Dear MarioD.

Y'see, this is the problem I'm hitting when I've been looking info up. You're saying add more reverb to the strings than the piano, the other guy's saying add reverb to the piano, leave the strings dry and people will think the reverb from the piano's on the strings! I'm not trying to argue with ANYONE as I don't kow what I'm doing anyway, it's just diametrically opposing viewpoints. And I've read somewhere else that reverb pushes sounds back so I'm going to go with you and put reverb on the strings, sorry Herb Hartley, I'll try yours as well.

MarioD, QSE IS a DAW, in its own way. OK when you input notes with a mouse - which I do, I'm disabled - they're obviously MIDI but you can still insert 4 effects per track including on the out track so you can have Reverb, Compression and 2 others per track. You also get automation, panning, balance (never worked out the difference between panning and balance!) Velocity, all with CC changes and there's LOADS of spare CCs to MIDI learn things to. Thing IS, not everything uses CCs for some reason so I stick with things that DO, Edirol does, some of the posher packages don't so I've had to dump their demo versions and stick with Edirol! (How the heck are you supposed to control things with no CC changes? Rhetorical question, but it bugs me.)

Why I'm saying all this is ideally, I'd love to write-an-mix-on-the-go. I think of a tune, write it, chuck the backing on, mix it, then decide a chunk of it's useless and needs a rewrite. If I'm using wave files, I've got to close down DAW, reopen QSE, reopen sound packages, put sounds back into sound packages, rewrite chunk, resave as sound files, reopen DAW, re-insert soundfiles. That's if I change one note or 200 notes! If I'm doing it all in QSE, I just change the bit I don't like on-the-fly and carry on mixing. It's instantaneous and intuitive and soundfiles are SOO long-winded if you want to change anything (I can't play keyboards, lack of co-ordination, I'm mousebound!)

Thanks for reading this if anyone does.

Chris.